Telecouplings

Achieving global sustainability goals will likely require a targeted focus on the distant effects of local actions (telecouplings, such as spillover effects). Many existing environmental policy frameworks enable jurisdictions to meet targets by externalizing impacts to other jurisdictions (e.g., national greenhouse gas emissions and water use can and have been reduced in part by importing GHG- and water-intensive agricultural commodities rather than producing them).

While these allowances may have benefits, global sustainability will require assessing, addressing, and closing these loopholes.

Background

Systems in distant places across the world are increasingly interconnected, both environmentally and socioeconomically. The term telecoupling was created to describe socioeconomic and environmental interactions between multiple coupled systems over distances (Liu et al., 2013).

The concept of telecoupling is a logical extension of coupled human and natural systems because it connects distant systems instead of just studying individual systems separately or comparing different systems.

Telecoupling is an umbrella concept that encompasses many distant processes, such as

migration, trade, tourism, species invasion, environmental flows, foreign direct investment, and disease spread. It expands beyond distant socioeconomic processes such as globalization by explicitly and systematically including environmental dimensions, and expands beyond distant environmental processes such as teleconnection by explicitly and systematically including socioeconomic dimensions simultaneously. As such, telecoupling emphasizes reciprocal cross-scale and cross-border interactions (e.g., feedbacks). It also helps to better understand

interactions among multiple distant processes (Liu et al., 2015a). Many telecouplings have existed since the beginning of human history, but their speed is much faster, their extents much broader, and their impacts much larger than in the past. Furthermore, current telecouplings occur in an entirely new context with many more people and more tightly constrained resources than ever before. Telecoupling can affect biodiversity and nature’s contributions to people in distant locations and across local to global scales, with profound implications for the Aichi Targets, United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, and the Paris Agreement.

Spillover effects have been largely overlooked. For example, for international trade, the focus has been usually on impacts on trade partners. Several studies have reported spillover effects (also called offsite effects or spatial externalities) (e.g., van Noordwijk et al., 2004; Halpern,

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2008). Placing spillover effects under the telecoupling framework can facilitate holistic

understanding and management of the effects, as it helps to not only uncover the effects, but also connect them with causes and agents as well as flows across all relevant systems.

Evidence

As illustrated in Supplementary Table 5.4.4, many studies have demonstrated impacts of telecouplings on nature and nature’s contributions to people. International trade has substantial impacts on ecosystem services and biodiversity in exporting countries (Lenzen et al., 2012).

Traditional trade research has focused on socioeconomic interactions between trade partners at the national scale, with some separate studies centered on environmental impacts (e.g., Lambin et al., 2011; DeFries et al., 2010). More recently, studies have also showed that patterns of international investments through tax-havens also have a direct impact on biodiversity loss in commodity-producing regions such as the Amazon (Galaz et al., 2018). Such impacts result from land conversion from natural cover such as forests to crops (Brown et al., 2014), or from

pollution of water or air. It is clear that importing countries obtain environmental benefits (e.g., land allocation for biodiversity conservation and restoration rather than food production) at the expense of environmental degradation in exporting countries (Galloway et al., 2007; Lenzen et al., 2012; Moran and Kanemoto, 2017). For example, imports of food and other goods often have associated ecological footprints in producing regions (MacDonald et al., 2015).

Spillover effects occur all over the world. These effects can be positive or negative, socioeconomic or/and environmental. They can be more profound than effects within the systems being actively managed. Evidence so far indicates that spillover effects are largely negative, such as degrading distant biodiversity, ecosystems and ecosystem services. In fact, much of the environmental impacts in many nations stem from activities driven by distant demand (e.g., via the production of goods for export) (Halpern et al., 2008; also see 5.4.1.2).

Spillover effects are so prevalent that even policies intended to enhance regional or national sustainability can be perverse by shifting pressures to other places (Pascual et al., 2017b). Those other places may have lower environmental standards (Liu and Diamond, 2003) but richer biodiversity. For example, Sweden reduced rates of logging in Swedish forests, which increased imports from countries with greater forest biodiversity. Sweden also reduced oil use by

substituting biofuels derived primarily from Brazilian sugar cane ethanol (Bolwig and Gibbon, 2009).

Even conservation efforts can generate negative spillover effects (Figure 5.9). To conserve Amazonian forests, two supply-chain agreements (i.e., the Soy Moratorium and

zero-deforestation beef agreements) have been implemented in the Amazon. Their implementation has substantially reduced deforestation in the Amazon, but increased deforestation in the Cerrado (e.g., a 6.6-fold increase in Tocantins State of the Cerrado) (Dou et al., 2018). The US and European Union countries implemented biofuel mandates to reduce their domestic carbon footprints, but these significantly changed land use and increased carbon footprints elsewhere (e.g., Africa, Asia) (Liu et al., 2013).

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Figure 5.9. Examples of telecoupling effects, in this case via unintended consequences associated with place-based ecosystem assessments. Current ecosystem-services assessments focus on the benefits, trade-offs and synergies provided by ecosystem services within a delimited (often jurisdictional) boundary (green arrows) and the impacts that human activities have over such ecosystem services therein (grey arrows). Ecosystem assessments thus tend to overlook off-stage ecosystem service burdens (negative impacts on ecosystem services elsewhere; red arrows) of place-based management decisions and their feedbacks (e.g., due to climate change, bottom arrow re-entering the smaller white ellipse). Figure reprinted from Pascual et al. (2017). All images are catalogued as CC Public Domain (Creative Commons, extracted from Pixabay (photographers: Alexas, Dpatdfci, NickJack and Valiunic) and Wikipedia (photographers:

Clipper and Hayden).

Possible points of action

International agreements such as The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species Flora and Fauna (CITES) and Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) deal with distant interactions (e.g. trade), but could do so more effectively (Liu et al., 2013). For example, telecoupling effects could be systematically integrated into processes of evaluating and revising Convention and REDD+. Parties who are responsible for telecoupling effects can be identified and held accountable for negative effects (e.g., providing payment or compensation). New agreements may be needed to incorporate telecoupling effects.

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Trade policies could be refined to disincentivize trade that entails negative spillover effects.

Policies might restrict imports of products whose production entails large environmental damages (perhaps in part because the exporting country has very low environmental protection standards (Liu et al., 2016)). For example, the EU’s Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT, http://www.euflegt.efi.int/) bans the import of illegally harvested timber as a step to reduce spillover effects, which could be applied to other sectors. Such policies could be

designed to raise standards by providing some assistance for nations lacking sufficient

environmental governance regimes without punishing nations already suffering from extreme poverty.

Conservation scientists, policy-makers and practitioners can also aid global sustainability by considering telecoupling effects in the design and evaluation of conservation policies, paying attention to negative effects outside focal conservation areas. Analyses of outcomes of

conservation policies could include spillover effects in addition to the effects on the system in question.